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“The perfectly imperfect,” says Steven Billig, who with his brother Richard owns and operates S&R Designs, Marlton, New Jersey. De Massima, their rough jewelry collection, exploded after its 2007 debut. Says Billig, “We’ve gone from an overabundance of material to sourcing that’s getting a little difficult. Most of our cost, the learning curve and time taken to launch, was the workmanship of one-of-a-kind settings. All that hammered gold, all that drilling for the seats of stones that can’t be prong set. Keeping that all cost-efficient is crucial to a category that is turning out to be price sensitive: a 10 carat total weight retailing for $6,000 to $8,000 may not sound as sensitive as $18,000 to $25,000 for a 5 to 12 carat total polished diamond piece—but, and let’s be honest, we’re talking about stones that, if you see one on the street, you may just give it a little kick as you walk by.”

That “pedestrian” reaction to uncut diamond, that shock of the new that is quite understandable for anyone with limited exposure to rough, has been eroded over the past decade by a return to older cuts that, per force, hewed closer to the contours of rough octahedrons and cubes: the rose, single, mine, table, old European, triangular cuts. Not surprisingly, designers such as Billig, while sharing the appreciation of untouched rough that marks the jewelry of Reed, De Beers, and Diamond in the Rough, will give a rose cut faceting to the crowns of diamonds they feel may need a bit more pop, particularly a yellow or brown that will show greater body color for it.

More often, they’ll set rough main events amid walls and backgrounds of polished melee. A beautiful example is a large rough and polished diamond pendant: 11 main event rough stones of 6.85 carats amid 3.5 carats of white melee. All stones are handset with hammers and drills into the 18k yellow gold pendant (one rarely sees prongs in rough jewelry). Four of five yellows in the piece (the other six cover the brown gamut) have been given a slight haircut of a rose cut. It not only makes them pop but creates a work of art of what might otherwise have seemed an expensive mini-rock garden. Is it less a rough diamond piece because of that haircut? In this case, a simple who cares suffices. The piece makes a strong statement about rough diamonds.

STAKING THE HIGH GROUND

Whether simple or ornate, wildly figurative or more traditionally design oriented, rough diamond jewelry always makes a strong statement. In such a fledgling category, the artist may not fully know what her statement is, but she’ll see nonetheless—as an epiphany. As with any art form, strength of statement enables the artist to stake ground.

Wade Watson of Pride Diamond, a miner in Sierra Leone who partnered with the international conglomerate, Target Resources, in early 2007, had one of those epiphanies when the Target sale was in its final stages. “There was some rough left over,” he recalls, “200 carats or so, and I just bought it—why, I couldn’t say. As a business proposition: These were nice clear macles, profound octahedrons you could see through, SI or better in a few cases. But they also spoke to me about Sierra Leone, which I love so much.”

Watson took a few stones to cutters, but also designers: Tracy Matthews, Deirdre Featherstone, Me & Ro, London’s Fifi Bijoux. He had a vision of connecting the end consumer directly to the Sierra Leone villagers who’d mined these stones, a connection made direct by their uncut beauty and simplicity. He knew it would involve a superior design sensibility. Two years later, the 40 piece Ruff & Cut collection, with stones from that original parcel and others, is set to unveil, and the high ground he’d sensed with that first parcel is central to the collection.

“Ethical jewelry,” Watson identifies it simply. “Entirely visible, transparent, set in 18k certified recycled gold, with 10 percent of business going directly to NGOs, and hopefully soon to be made entirely in Africa, even within spitting distance of where the stones were mined.” With Todd Reed, Watson is now working on ethical protocols and standards for the nascent rough jewelry industry.